Motherboard added that the programmer said they lived in a country where it was “not safe” to own Bitcoin and therefore wanted to keep their name secret.

The puzzle encoded a string of binary – a series of zeroes and ones – in complicated rows of flames painted around the edge of the canvas.

The colour and shape of each flame determined a four-character chunk of the binary series, with a further part of the code represented by six ribbons of different lengths in the bottom right-hand corner.

After all of these codes had been worked out and linked together, the successful puzzle-solver was able to translate the full string of zeroes and ones into a Bitcoin private key with the help of a simple computer program.

‘Genuine brain puzzle’

It wasn’t surprising that it had taken so long for someone to solve the painting’s code, said Peter Todd, a cryptography consultant.

“Puzzles like that one aren’t things you can just throw computing power at – they’re genuine brain puzzles,” he told the BBC.

This is not the first time someone has claimed bitcoins after cracking a puzzle set by their original owner.